wild 1995

Chapter 93
On March 1995, 3, when Di Ye completed the customs clearance procedures and entered the territory of Hong Kong, Linus Torvalds released the Linux 7 kernel, which was the most important version in the Linux 1.2 era.

At this time, Linus is not only proud of his career, but also has a happy life. He is working as a teaching assistant at the University of Helsinki, while studying for a master's degree, and at the same time falling in love with Tafu, a kindergarten teacher who has 6 karate champion titles.

On March 3th, Linus got up at 15 o'clock in the morning as usual, had breakfast with his girlfriend Tuff, then went to the school office to go paddling.

"LRF-Di, isn't this the weird guy who quoted Mao Xuan to interpret software development theory?"

Linus' father was a communist and served as a senior member of the Finnish Communist Party. Under his influence, he had a kind of intimacy with Mao Xuan, so after reading those open source articles by Di Ye, he left an "interesting" comment, which still has an impression after many days.

"Let me see what weird new ideas you have."

Driven by curiosity, Linus opened the post and looked at it, and found that the concept of the "Open Source Manifesto" was consistent with the articles he had read before. The selection of Mao was still quoted at the beginning, but the text was more refined. The definition, meaning and superiority of open source were explained clearly in less than 1000 words.

This slogan is adapted from a famous saying that Linus and netizens shared in 2000. The original text is "Talk is cheap, Show me the code", which is generally translated into Chinese as "Let's talk nonsense, let's put the code here", which has been widely recognized by the programmer community.

In 1995, Linus didn't know that he would say this famous quote in the future, but it was in line with his usual style of action, so he was greatly appreciated. He replied "Cool!" at the bottom of the post, and then read the "Creative Sharing Manifesto".

The concept of "creative sharing" is proposed to solve the copyright problem in the Internet age. Because the network has anonymity and openness, anonymity increases the difficulty for users to obtain authorization, and openness increases the difficulty for creators to protect copyrights. Therefore, an agreement similar to open source licenses is needed, allowing creators to allow others to freely copy, disseminate or even modify works under certain conditions while retaining copyrights, so as to promote the circulation of knowledge.

The Internet product that best represents the creative sharing agreement is Wikipedia, but Wikipedia was born in 2001, so Linus lacks awareness of it, and he has always disliked entanglement in legal issues. After browsing a dozen lines, he lost interest and directly closed the post.

A few hours later, Linus returned to his office after teaching a course called "Introduction to Computer Science". He found a new email in his email client, which was sent by John Hall, the executive director of Linux International, so he opened it and looked.

Linux International is an organization established in 1994 with the purpose and purpose of promoting and popularizing Linux worldwide. In March 1995, this organization was fighting a lawsuit with a legal hooligan named William, because William registered Linux as a trademark and threatened to charge licensing fees to developers around the world.

John Hall’s email mentioned two things, both of which are related to LRF. One thing is that LRF donated $2 to support their lawsuit. The other thing is that LRF released an open source browser called Athlon. I hope Linus can help to promote it.

The only worry Linus has recently is the trademark lawsuit, because it costs at least 1.5 US dollars to hire a lawyer. Although the Linux system was well-known in 1995, it still lacks commercial applications, so no company is willing to provide financial support. Now, with the 2 US dollars donated by LRF, this problem can just be solved.

"Talk is cheap, Show your code! Let me see how your browser is doing."

Linus didn't value money, but wanted to settle this inexplicable lawsuit quickly, so he chanted the slogan in the "Open Source Manifesto", logged on to the official website of Athlon, and found that there were not only Linux versions, but also DOS and Windows versions. This kind of behavior is relatively rare in the circle of the free software movement, because those people either despise Microsoft or are hostile to Microsoft.

In addition to the browser program itself, Athlon's official website also has an introduction to the Xiaohonghua license and a self-narration of LRF.

Linus looked at the license first, and found that it was only a variant of the BSD protocol, so he skipped it directly and looked at the self-narration of LRF.

In the self-report, LRF briefly introduced his identity, saying that he is an undergraduate student at a university in mainland China. After coming into contact with the Internet for the first time on January 1 this year, he found that there are many problems and deficiencies in the HTTP protocol and HTML language, but no one has come forward to solve them.

"The current World Wide Web is like the American West in the 19th century. It is in a state of barbaric growth. In order to change all this, I decided to take on the role of sheriff. The code is my law, and the browser is my weapon. From now on, all unruly guys will be eliminated by me one by one."

"What an arrogant guy!"

Linus liked the analogy of the sheriff very much. He raised his coffee cup and applauded at the screen. Then he downloaded the Linux version of Athlon and tried it for a while. He felt that it was very similar to Netscape 0.9 released by Netscape a few months ago.

"Well, this is a good programmer, and maybe he will come up with some interesting things in the future."

Out of love for that slogan and respect for good programmers, Linus posted a post in the Linux newsgroup, briefly introduced Athlon, and then put the matter behind him.

On March 3, about 15 users downloaded the Athlon browser. Most of them shared the same opinion as Linus, thinking that the code was well written, but the functions were mediocre, no different from Netscape's browser.

The only person who thinks Athlon is dangerous is Netscape star programmer Jamie Zawinski. He is an active member of the free software movement. He is responsible for the development of the Unix version of the browser at Netscape. He discovered Athlon through Linus’s post. He ran to his boss Michael Toy and said, “You should show this browser to Mark. It may affect the company’s listing plan.”

Michael Toy is a tall white man. After trying the Athlon for 2 minutes, he said disapprovingly: "This is just a poor imitation of Netscape 0.9. We have already upgraded to 1.0."

"But its code quality is better than the 0.9 version we wrote."

"Ordinary users don't care about code quality, they only care about price and features."

"What if it's Microsoft? I heard that they are negotiating with Spyglass to buy the license of the Mosic browser. Mosic is a product from two years ago, and its functions are far inferior to Athlon. The license used by Athlon is very loose. Microsoft doesn't need to buy a license, it can be directly used for commercial use."

Toy was taken aback for a moment, then hesitated and said, "Microsoft probably won't use open source products."

"That's not necessarily the case. When Microsoft seizes the market, it will use any means."

　Today I have an urgent matter to go out by train, so I can only code a chapter with my mobile phone, and it should be able to update normally after returning home tomorrow.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)